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It's a long story but here's the short version.
In the early days of air combat in WWI, when it became obvious that national markings were needed, the Brits applied the Union Jack to their aircraft. From a distance that marking was impossible to make out. The French, meanwhile, adapted the cocarde (i.e. cockade, or roundel) which had been in use as a personal decoration since the Revolution of 1789. (It's basically made by bending a French flag into a circle.) On the tails, they used red-white-blue (generally front to back, although at first the reverse order was often used) stripes, generally on the rudders and often also the elevators, which was more of a direct representation of the French flag.
Looking for an easier to discern marking the Brits adopted the French design but with the colors reversed, so that blue was on the outside of the roundel and the front of the rudder. It turned out that the general pattern of circles on the wings and vertical stripes on the tail was useful for distinguishing all Allied aircraft from those of the Central Powers (which had crosses everywhere) under conditions when the exact colors were hard to make out, so the same pattern was adopted by Italy (green-white-red) (all colors out-to-in on roundel and front-to-back on tail), the USA (red-blue-white cocarde, white-blue-red tail, as on US-flown Nieuport 28s), Imperial Russia (same as USA, until 1917 revolution), and a few other nations. After a short time, the USA changed its fin stripes to match the French (see e.g. Rickenbacker's famous Spad).
After the war, things changed around some more, with Britain switching to red-white-blue rudders and the USA switching to blue-white-red. This persisted on US aircraft after the adoption of the star roundel; you can see it on the preserved Fokker T2 at the NASM, for example. The Navy, in particular, stuck with tail stripes into the 1930s (e.g. on Curtiss F9C, early Dauntlesses, Catalinas, Ducks, etc.). By that time the Army Air Corps had switched to the famous variation where 13 alternating red and white stripes occupied the rear 2/3 of the rudder. All US national tail markings disappeared in 1942 and attempts to bring them back officially after WWII did not succeed.
In the late 1930s the Brits shifted the stripes from the rudder to the fixed part of the fin, and basically it stayed that way. So, the marking doesn't "mean" or "stand for" much other than as a secondary designation of nationality, but it has a history that goes back to the birth of air fighting.
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